Khalid’s Border Language in The Book of Khalid

الملخص

Hybrid writers fabricate border languages which are totally different than their homeland languages. Ameen Rihani wrote several works in English, which fall under the category of border and hybrid works. However, the best of his works which fulfills this categorization is The Book of Khalid (1911). Rihani was the first Arab author to publish a novel in English about a hybrid protagonist who lives on the border between both worlds: East and West. Hybridity indicates any work or character which is a cross of at least two separate cultures. In science, a hybrid refers to an organism that is a crossbreed of two or more organisms. Homi K. Bhabha, a literary theorist and scholar, co-opted the terms hybrid and hybridity to discuss the formation of new identities and concepts in the midst of colonization. A hybrid is someone who is of mixed race or origin, and many writers who pen literature about hybridity are oftentimes hybrid themselves and have experienced life between two more cultures.

The Book of Khalid is a hybrid literary work which chronicles the experience of a Lebanese immigrant, Khalid, who lives a very enriching life between the East and West. Many critics claim that Khalid’s life reflects that of Ameen Rihani himself. The significance of this novel is that it is written from the border, the in-between, so readers gain an insight into both worlds from two perspectives. On the terrain of the border, he starts to fabricate a new hybrid border language. Khalid’s border language can be characterized as rhizomatic, like the Mestiza’s language, and minoritarian.

Khalid’s language is like that of the Mestiza. Gloria Anzaldúa describes the unity of the Mestiza and the border language: “I am my language. Until I can take pride in my language, I cannot take pride in myself” (1999, p. 81). Similarly, Khalid also lives in his border language, and constructs his nation and his new self in a border narrative, which encompasses his “in- between” life. Khalid creates a new language because languages of both worlds are not suitable for his new world, and he is aware that he cannot exist without a new language. According to Walter Benjamin, there is no human existence outside language:

The existence of language, however, is not only coextensive with all the areas of human mental expression in which language is always in one sense or another inherent, but with absolutely everything. There is no event or thing in either animate or inanimate nature that does not in some way partake of language, for it is in the nature of all to communicate their mental meanings. (1978, p. 314)